A Haven for New York Relics Saved From the Trash Heap. In Connecticut.

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Evan Blum, 59, has filled a complex of buildings in Ivoryton, Conn., with architectural artifacts, many of them recovered from New York City buildings.CreditChristopher Capozziello for The New York Times

IVORYTON, Conn. — If New York had an attic, it could well be the sprawling complex of old brick buildings on Main Street in this sleepy village, a two-hour drive northeast of the city.

There is no sign to indicate that inside this former piano-key factory is one of the largest collections of architectural artifacts salvaged from city buildings.

“It’s the sixth borough,” joked the owner, Evan Blum, 59, who has spent four decades as a collector and dealer of architectural remnants.

Mr. Blum has been filling the buildings over the past few years with newly rescued items as well as overflow from an inventory acquired over the decades.

Inside is a sea of ornamental fixtures and furnishings that have been pulled from buildings being demolished or renovated — and most of it is for sale.

There are a pair of carved oak transoms that once hung over the main entrance to the first Helen Hayes Theater, on West 46th Street in Manhattan. Cost: $14,000 each, including restoration.

For $15,000, you can pick up a carved oak fireplace reclaimed from John D. Rockefeller’s estate in Lakewood Township, N.J. For another $15,000, you could buy a bank of seven phone booths from the Roseland Ballroom, which closed in 2014.

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Mr. Blum’s collection comprises tens of thousands of items, from small fixtures to whole facades.CreditChristopher Capozziello for The New York Times

There is the centuries-old carved oak paneling that once adorned a room in Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney’s mansion on Fifth Avenue (price tag: $75,000).

In a city that is constantly evolving, the business of architectural salvaging is well established, and perhaps no one in the field is better known than Mr. Blum. His eclectic showroom at Demolition Depot & Irreplaceable Artifacts on East 125th Street in Harlem is popular among collectors and designers.

The showroom is vast, but contains only a tiny percentage of the immense stock that Mr. Blum keeps mostly in Connecticut, which few people, even many of his most devoted clients, have seen.

The motherlode lies in a complex of seven large buildings that Mr. Blum bought several years ago for its 15 acres of indoor floor space. He says his is the largest private collection of architectural ornaments in the country, and it is growing faster than ever, as New York City’s construction boom yields more artifacts than he can save.

“They’re taking down and gutting buildings faster than we can keep up with right now,” he said. “I have 25 churches to do before the end of the year.”

The sheer quantity is staggering — tens of thousands of artifacts, from windows, doors, toilets, tubs and light fixtures to entire saloon bars, building facades and paneled room interiors.

Mr. Blum has about 65 of these interiors, some of which are set up in the huge storage areas like museum exhibits, including a paneled room from an apartment on West 12th Street where the publisher Malcolm Forbes once lived.

Then there are the nearly 500 ornate fireplaces, many of them from prominent Manhattan mansions. There is a rare French marble fireplace from the New Canaan, Conn., home of Huguette Clark, the reclusive heiress who died in 2011, and another from Ms. Whitney’s mansion in Manhattan.

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A carved oak transom that once hung over the first Helen Hayes Theater, on 46th Street in Manhattan.CreditChristopher Capozziello for The New York Times

“I got 90 of these out of the Plaza,” Mr. Blum said, pointing out marble fireplaces taken from the Plaza Hotel. Their details were highlighted with gold paint, which he described as being “Ivana-ized,” a reference to Ivana Trump, who helped run the hotel in the late 1980s, when her husband at the time, Donald J. Trump, owned it. Prices for the fireplaces range from $6,500 to $19,500, depending on size and type, he said.

Other fireplaces have severely distressed finishes and cracked paint, a look that attracts some of the high-end designers who are Mr. Blum’s clients. He said he had pulled about 30 of the fireplaces from a hotel on Houston Street that had been boarded up for decades.

Nearby were some old panes of Tudor-style stained glass recovered from a penthouse on 57th Street where the actor Errol Flynn once lived. They would soon be installed in a P. J. Clarke’s restaurant set to open in Philadelphia, said Mr. Blum, who offers design services for restaurants, hotels and other spaces that incorporate his pieces.

He paused at the transom from the Helen Hayes Theater, which was torn down in 1982 despite heated opposition from preservationists.

He said that back then he had been hired by the city’s Landmarks Preservation Commission to dismantle the theater and put the artifacts into the agency’s salvage collection program. When the program folded, he said, he bought much of the inventory, including the theater transoms.

Some preservationists have criticized Mr. Blum and other salvagers, arguing that selling reclaimed artifacts induces developers to sell original elements of buildings and creates a vibrant market for items that might be better placed in museums.

But Mr. Blum said he acquired pieces only when buildings were being torn down. Typically, he makes agreements with companies that gut or demolish buildings, he said, sometimes for a fee.

“I hate to see a building come down, but I don’t have the authority to stop it,” he said. “So I pick up the pieces and save what I can from going to the landfill.”

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The collection is stored on roughly 15 acres of indoor space in a seven-building complex that was formerly a piano-key factory.CreditChristopher Capozziello for The New York Times

In one of his storage buildings, he pointed out the front and back bars from Gino’s, a restaurant that had been a fixture of Lexington Avenue until it closed in 2010. Elsewhere were the reception counter and several display cases from the 21 Club, as well as a vast expanse of bathroom furnishings that he said was merely one-twentieth of his reserve of such materials.

“I have the largest collection of vintage plumbing in the world,” he said.

Moving on, he came upon the phone booths from the Roseland Ballroom, covered with rock band stickers and graffiti. Mr. Blum recalled one of his workers asking if they should be stripped clean.

“I said, ‘No, don’t touch it — that’s the best part of it,’” he recounted.

On the grass outside the old factory buildings were entire building fronts that had been removed piece by piece. There was the terra cotta facade from the Savoy Theater on Bedford Avenue in Brooklyn, and, next to a stream, the disassembled facade from the old RKO Jefferson Theater that once stood on East 14th Street in Manhattan, he said.

Mr. Blum owned a Manhattan showroom on Second Avenue and Houston Street, which became mired in controversy in 2000 after a partial collapse. The authorities attributed the collapse to dubious construction and later charged him with negligence.

Mr. Blum denied the charges. He said they were retaliation for a lawsuit he had filed against the city for barring him from the property after the collapse, which he said facilitated the theft of artifacts by a city employee. The building was eventually knocked down, and while Mr. Blum was acquitted of the most serious charges, he was convicted of a misdemeanor count of reckless endangerment.

Over the years, Mr. Blum said, he has held onto the property and turned down lucrative offers from developers because he plans to build a museum for architectural art and preservation with educational programs.

“It’s going to be one giant mosaic of a lot of pieces I’ve saved over the years,” he said, adding that the size of the Ivoryton buildings had allowed him to spread out his collection and take stock of it as he develops his museum design.

“It’s about leaving a legacy behind and creating a public awareness about our architectural history and culture, and preserving what we can before it gets eradicated,” Mr. Blum said. Referring to how the extraordinary pace of development in New York City is accelerating the demise of older buildings, he added: “We’re losing it by the boatloads. I wish I had more staff and more warehouse space.”